Economic Institutions: Class & Party Intersect

Business: from a partisan asset to a partisan wash

Confidence in major companies has fallen roughly in half over the GSS's history — from 31% in 1973 to 15% in 2024 — and the decline has been close to monotonic. The peak of the series was 1984, in the early Reagan-era boom; the trough was 2010, two years after the financial crisis. The shape is a long slow grind.

The topline understates what has changed. For most of the series, "Republicans more trusting of major companies than Democrats" was one of the most reliable patterns in American politics — a 10-to-15-point gap, present in nearly every wave. Figure 2 shows what happened to it.

Two things are worth noting about the closure of this gap.

The first is that it is happening via the Republican line falling, not via the Democratic line rising. Democratic confidence in major companies has been in the low-to-mid teens since 2010, with a small bump around 2018. Republican confidence was 27% in 2018 and is 16% in 2024. If the closure persists, the contemporary Republican coalition will be the first in the GSS's history that does not have higher confidence in big business than the Democratic coalition does.

The second is that this has happened during a six-year period in which the Republican Party has held the presidency for half the time and held a majority of the Supreme Court throughout. The closure is not a partisan-control effect of the kind that drives confidence in the executive branch (Ch. 1). It is something more durable — a coalition shift, in which the kinds of voters joining the Republican Party have grown more skeptical of corporate America at the same time the Democratic Party's traditional skepticism has stayed roughly where it was.

Banks: the 2008 bipartisan collapse, with a partisan twist after

Confidence in banks and financial institutions is the cleanest example in this entire chapter of a period effect — a sharp, time-anchored shock that overrides partisan structure for the duration of the shock and resets the baseline after.

The 2008 financial crisis is the kind of thing that, in a long-run survey, is supposed to look like a small ripple — short shocks regress to the mean. The banks series shows that some shocks do not. Confidence in banks fell 20 points in four years and did not recover to anything near the pre-crisis baseline in the 14 years that followed. The contemporary level of confidence in banks (17% in 2024) is closer to the post-crash trough (11% in 2010) than it is to the pre-crash 2006 level (31%). The American public's relationship to its financial institutions has been remade by an event sixteen years in the rear-view mirror.

The partisan twist on this series is more recent and easier to miss in the chart. From the 1990s through 2018, Republicans were modestly more trusting of banks than Democrats were — typically 5 to 8 points more confident, the same direction as on major companies but smaller in magnitude. By 2024 that gap had reversed: D=20%, R=14%. Democrats are now more confident in banks than Republicans are. This is the same coalition-realignment story as on major companies, just measurable on a different institution.

Labor: the only economic institution moving the other way

Of the three major economic institutions the GSS tracks, labor is the outlier. Confidence in major companies has fallen by half. Confidence in banks has fallen by half and stayed there. Confidence in organized labor — never high to begin with — has not fallen at all.

Labor is the only institution covered in this section whose 2024 reading is higher than its 1973 reading. Not by much — 18% versus 16%. But against a backdrop where business and banks have lost half their confidence, "barely any change" is itself a finding. The story underneath that flat topline is a redistribution: which Americans express confidence in organized labor has changed dramatically.

The fifty-year reversal in the age structure of labor confidence is one of the clearer examples of a generational dynamic in this book. It is not a story of older Americans gradually changing their minds — the 50–64 cohort in 1973 (people born 1909–1923) and the 50–64 cohort in 2024 (people born 1960–1974) are different cohorts, and the question is largely about what those different cohorts brought into adulthood with them. The 1973 50-somethings came of age during peak American unionization. The 2024 50-somethings came of age during the Reagan-era decline. The 2024 18–34-year-olds — the highest-confidence group on the chart — are the cohort whose entry into the labor market has been characterized by Amazon warehouses, gig platforms, and the recent unionization waves at companies like Starbucks and the New York Times.

The party gap on labor is comparatively boring. Democrats have been more confident in labor than Republicans throughout the series, by roughly 4 to 6 points, with no sharp recent inflection. This is the one economic institution where the partisan story has been stable for fifty years.

Three institutions, three different stories

Read together, the three economic institutions in this section illustrate something the standard "trust in institutions has collapsed" narrative misses: institutional trust does not move as a single block. Each of these three series is its own story, with its own period effects, demographic structure, and political coalitions.

Major companies show the contemporary Republican populist turn. The 2018 → 2024 step in Republican confidence in big business is one of the largest short-window shifts in this entire book.

Banks show what a generational period effect looks like in survey data. The 2008 collapse remade the baseline; sixteen years later, the country has not recovered.

Labor shows what cohort replacement looks like when the underlying topic moves slowly. The institution itself has barely changed in its weight in American life — union density continues its long decline — but the kinds of Americans expressing confidence in it have rotated almost completely. The young replace the old; the gig-economy generation replaces the New Deal generation.

A book that stopped at "trust in institutions is down across the board" — a true sentence, taken on average — would miss all three. Part II spends one chapter per domain because that level of resolution is what these data require. The next section turns to the institutions that asked Americans to trust them in moral terms: organized religion, the military, and the sociocultural battery.